How far would you go to have a child? Artist Tabitha Moses thought she knew. For most of her life she hadn’t been particularly bothered about becoming a mother. When she and her husband, fellow artist Jim Loftus, decided to start trying for a baby in 2009, after they were married, she felt pretty blase about whether it happened or not. “I remember saying to my sister, ‘I’m definitely not desperate for a baby,’” says Tabitha, 43. “I’d never have imagined having IVF, and I certainly wouldn’t have believed we could ever end up using a donor egg.”

At first, it seemed parenthood would come easily. Early in 2010, Tabitha got pregnant. With the blue line on the test stick came the realisation that this was really important to her; but soon afterwards, she miscarried. It was a cruel blow, made worse when another conception failed. Medical tests revealed nothing; fertility drugs didn’t help. Eventually the couple, from Liverpool, were referred for IVF; and this, says Tabitha, is when she realised how desperation for a baby can set in and how it starts to eat away at you.

“People say, ‘relax, just forget about it’, but they don’t realise how much trying for a baby dominates your life. You’ve stopped drinking alcohol and caffeine, you’re taking folic acid and monitoring your temperature every morning: it’s not really conducive to relaxation or forgetting all about it,” she says.

Two rounds of IVF ended without a pregnancy – she began to realise what desperation meant. As well as using all the help medical science could offer, she found herself gravitating towards alternative therapies, folklore and superstitions: she had acupuncture and massages and hypnotherapy, and each evening she’d light a candle that was surrounded by a kind of shrine with a Ghanaian fertility figurine and a baby Jesus figure from a Christmas crib. “I’m not normally superstitious, but it just felt as though anything was worth trying.”

Tabitha and Gilda at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Inside the case is one of her art works, a hospital gown embroidered with symbols of her IVF experience. Photograph: Jon Super/Guardian

Then came another blow: the doctors told Tabitha she had a very low ovarian reserve. “That meant I would be extremely unlikely to get pregnant using my own eggs. I thought it was all over: but then I found myself talking to someone whose wife had been told the same thing, and she got pregnant using a donor egg. In the past that would have seemed completely beyond the pale, but now I started to think, could we do that?”

The only route to a donor egg was via a private clinic: Tabitha and Jim borrowed money from both sets of parents to raise the £6,000 they needed and signed up for treatment. The clinic said they would try to find a donor who matched her physical characteristics. “I remember the call where they said, ‘we’ve found a donor for you. She’s a great match: she’s 5ft 2in with blue eyes.’ And I suddenly thought, ‘but I’m 5ft 3in with bluey-grey eyes’. I think that was the moment when I had the emotional realisation that this baby wouldn’t have my genes.”

The donated egg was fertilised and implanted at five days: Tabitha and Jim hoped. Two weeks later came the morning of the pregnancy test. “It was 5am and I was kneeling on the bathroom floor waiting for the result. I remember hearing the birds singing outside the window and thinking that whatever happened the birds would still sing.”

That was 18 months ago – Tabitha and Jim now have a daughter, Gilda, 10 months. The pregnancy was straightforward: only once, says Tabitha, did she have a wobble about whether she’d bond with her baby. “I felt connected to her while she was growing inside me, but I started to worry about what it would be like after she was born.” Those worries proved groundless. “She totally feels as though she’s my daughter; she’s as much my daughter as she could possibly be. She looks very like Jim, which helps a lot, and she has these gorgeous lips and I often think how grateful I am to the donor because those lips must have come from her.”

Tabitha says she often thinks about the donor, about whom she knows little. “There’s a letter from her, telling us a bit about herself, at the clinic and for a long time I didn’t feel ready to read it. But now I feel so secure in my relationship with Gilda that I think I would like to read it – but I’m so busy being a mum that I’ve not had time to go back to the clinic and request it.”

Close up of the embroidery on the front of the hospital gown, one of the works by Tabitha Moses on show in Liverpool at the Walker Gallery. Photograph: Jon Super/Guardian

Tabitha’s years of waiting and hoping for a baby have proved fertile in more ways than one. “Even when I was lying with my legs in stirrups at the IVF clinic waiting for the fertilised embryo to be put into my womb, I remember thinking that, whatever happened, it was all going to be useful material. Any artist would think like this: all experiences can feed into what you produce. But I was also giving myself a safety net, thinking something good will come of this, baby or not.”

So, alongside the quest for a baby, Tabitha began to work on art that reflected her journey. One piece she produced is The Wish, which consists of a lightbox on which she projected an image that was 50% her, 50% Jim. At another point, when the couple briefly considered adoption, Tabitha made an artwork based on the brochures filled with photographs of potential adoptees. “Going through them was heartbreaking; I wanted to take every one of them home,” she remembers.

The most striking work produced as a result of her IVF experience is based on the white hospital gown she wore at her clinic appointments; on to it, she has embroidered pictures representing what happened to her. The embryos that didn’t work out are there, as is a streak of red that denotes her miscarriage. There’s a thermometer, a syringe, drugs; teardrops; and the Ghanaian fertility figure and the baby Jesus. She enlisted the help of two other women who had also undergone IVF and designed gowns for them, too; all three can be seen at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. One of them includes an image of a pair of leopard-print “lucky” knickers the woman wore every time she went to the IVF clinic. “The point I wanted to make is that you don’t know what you’ll resort to when you want a baby that badly. You never think you’d be superstitious about your knickers, or that you’d feel the need to light candles every evening; you don’t think you’d use IVF or a donor egg. They seemed like things other people would do, not me.”

Tabitha rarely thinks about the facts of Gilda’s conception now, beyond offering those silent thanks to the donor. In time, she says, she’ll introduce her daughter to the knowledge about her beginnings using picture books. Her big hope is that, when she’s 18, Gilda decides to contact her genetic mother. “I simply want to say thank you,” she says.